An Excuse-Spouting Bush Is Busted by 9/11 Report

Robert Scheer

Los Angeles Times

July 27, 2004

Busted! Like a teenager whose beer bash is interrupted by his parents' early
return home, President Bush's nearly three years of bragging about his "war on
terror" credentials has been exposed by the bipartisan 9/11 commission as
nothing more than empty posturing.

Without dissent, five prominent
Republicans joined an equal number of their Democratic Party peers in stating
unequivocally that the Bush administration got it wrong, both in its lethargic
response to an unprecedented level of warnings during what the commission calls
the "Summer of Threat," as well as in its inclusion of Iraq in the war on
terror.

Although the language of the commission's report was
carefully couched to obtain a bipartisan consensus, the indictment of this
administration surfaces on almost every page.

Bush was not the first
U.S. president to play footsie with Muslim extremists in Afghanistan, Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan, nor was the Clinton administration without fault in its
fitful and ineffective response to the Al Qaeda threat. But there was simply
no excuse for the near-total indifference of the new president and his top
Cabinet officials to strenuous warnings from the outgoing Clinton
administration and the government's counter-terrorism experts that something
terrible was coming, fast and hard, from Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden's gang,
they said repeatedly, was planning "near-term attacks," which Al Qaeda
operatives expected "to have dramatic consequences of catastrophic
proportions."

As early as May 2001, the FBI was receiving tips that
Bin Laden supporters were planning attacks in the U.S., possibly including the
hijacking of planes. On May 29, White House counter-terrorism chief Richard
Clarke wrote national security advisor Condoleezza Rice that "when these
attacks [on Israeli or U.S. facilities] occur, as they likely will, we
will wonder what more we could have done to stop them." At the end of June,
the commission wrote, "the intelligence reporting consistently described the
upcoming a ttacks as occurring on a calamitous level." In early July, Atty.
Gen. John Ashcroft was told "that preparations for multiple attacks [by Al
Qaeda] were in late stages or already complete and that little additional
warning could be expected." By month's end, "the system was blinking red" and
could not "get any worse," then-CIA Director George Tenet told the 9/11
commission.

It was at this point, of course, that George W. Bush
began the longest presidential vacation in 32 years. On the very first day of
his visit to his Texas ranch, Aug. 6, Bush received the now-infamous two-page
intelligence alert titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the United
States." Yet instead of returning to the capital to mobilize an energetic
defensive posture, he spent an additional 27 days away as the government
languished in summer mode, in deep denial.

"In sum," said the 9/11
commission report, "the domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the
threat. They did not have the direction, and did n ot have a plan to
institute. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not
fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat.
State and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI's
efforts. The public was not warned."

In her public testimony to the
commission, Rice argued that the Aug. 6 briefing concerned vague "historical
information based on old reporting," adding that "there was no new threat
information." When the commission forced the White House to release the
document, however, this was exposed as a lie: The document included explicit
FBI warnings of "suspicious activity in this country consistent with
preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent
surveillance of federal buildings in New York." Furthermore, this briefing was
only one of 40 on the threat of Bin Laden that the president received between
Jan. 20 and Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush, the commission report also makes
clear, compounded U.S. vulnera bility by totally misleading Americans about
the need to invade Iraq as a part of the "war on terror."

For those,
like Vice President Dick Cheney, who continue to insist that the jury is still
out on whether Al Qaeda and Iraq were collaborators, the commission's report
should be the final word, finding after an exhaustive review that there is no
evidence that any of the alleged contacts between Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein
"ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we
seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or
carrying out any attacks against the United States."

So, before 9/11,
incompetence and sloth. And after? Much worse: a war without end on the
wrong battlefield.